Users often need to access a particular piece of information stored on a personal computer. For example, a user might need to find a particular email message or document that is stored on the computer. The increasing amount of information and the many different types of information (e.g., telephone calls, e-mails, and instant messages) that are being accessed by users can make finding a particular piece of information a difficult and time consuming task.
Keyword-based desktop search tools may help find information. However, a user needs to indicate exactly what he or she is looking for by explicitly typing in search terms. In some cases, a user may have information that they have forgotten about, or are not aware of, and as a result are unable to find information quickly and accurately.
Content-based matching and clustering approaches can help find other documents with similar content, but they may not easily find information that has different content even though it is highly relevant.
Neither keyword nor content based approaches may easily find a group of information relevant to a specific context. Consider, for example, a user who creates a document. While working on the document, the user accesses several Web pages and transmits the document to his or her co-worker as an email attachment. When the user later accesses that document, he or she might again be interested in those Web pages and the email message. However, neither keyword nor content based search approaches are typically able to recover all relevant information as a unit in such a situation.
Accordingly, there is a need for methods and apparatus that address these and other problems found in existing technologies.